Daily Archives: February 6, 2011

How many Lotusphere attendees will be visiting their chiropractors or massage therapists this week? Wouldn’t it be great if those backpacks had a hip belt to take the load off the back and shoulders? Please put that in your evals. Every year my back and neck suffer from lugging around the laptop and other junk. It was nice to see more information was provided in electronic format, but not everything can be done that way. So please, IBM, get backpacks with a hip belt.

This reminds me of a story that one of my computer science college professors told back in the old days. It went something like this…

My professor told a story of how he was working on a military project writing software for the F-16 fighter jet. At one point in the process a military guy came to him and asked how much his software weighed. “It doesn’t weigh anything. It’s software.” The sergeant insisted that it must have a weight and that they needed to have an exact measurement as they need to measure every ounce that goes into that plane. After several minutes of arguing, the professor realized he wasn’t going to be able to convince the sergeant of the lack of mass of a program. So he reached down beside his desk and picked up a big box of punch cards — yes, those punch cards that he was using to write the software. One 3×7 card for each line of code. This was circa 1970’s. — and gave it to the sergeant and told him to go weigh it. Off he went with his box to be weighed. My guess is that as a result, the F-16 fighter could carry about 20 pounds more than anyone realizes.